Alaska Airlines claims that operational shutdowns have nothing to do with cybersecurity breaches to recover from system-wide ground stops that have stopped flying for about three hours over the weekend.
Alaska and its local subsidiary Horizon Air have experienced a “critical IT outage” that urged Alaska to request a July 20th ground stop.
The ground stop lasted around local time, from Seattle to 11:00pm that night.
The event created a cascade series disruption throughout the Alaska network, which continued until July 21st. At 12:00 that day, around 10% of Alaska flights were cancelled and 25% were delayed, according to flight tracking platform FlightAware.
According to Alaska, a total of about 200 flights have been cancelled as a result of the IT outage, affecting around 13,500 atmospheric travelers.
Further flight cancellations are possible as Alaska relocates its aircraft and crew. The airline says it is working to re-house passengers whose itinerary has been suspended.
“A critical part of multi-produced hardware in data centers manufactured by third parties has experienced an unexpected obstacle,” the airline says. When that happened, it affected several major systems that allowed us to perform different operations, requiring the implementation of ground stops to keep the aircraft in place.
“The safety of our flights was never compromised,” the company adds.
Alaska emphasizes that IT malfunctions are isolated occurrences and are unrelated to hacking and “other current events.”
“We're currently working with vendors to replace hardware equipment in our data centers,” Alaska says.
Canadian Carrier Westjet recently revealed that it is still investigating “sophisticated criminal third parties” who violated its database last month.
“Unfortunately, we can confirm that certain data was illegally retrieved from Westjet's system,” he said. “Thanks to our internal precautions, neither credit or debit card numbers nor guest user passwords were obtained.”
The failure of technology has resulted in recent famous operational meltdowns, including Southwest Airlines' disastrous 2022-23 winter holiday performance and last summer's Delta line.
These incidents affected the travel schedules of millions of passengers, causing both airlines to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
